If, during the current plague, you haven’t had quite enough of medical horrors and the clenching feeling of being utterly stuck in place, you may want to seek out the new HBO mini-series I Know This Much Is True (May 10), based on the 1996 smash-hit, Oprah’s Book Club novel by Wally Lamb. It ought to serve you the desired litany of tragedies and sorrows, a long ribbon of terrible things unspooled, with grim languor, by writer-director Derek Cianfrance. Though I found much of I Know This Much Is True to be a gloomy slog—turns out I was not one of the people looking for a story of illness and regret at this particular juncture—it does, in Cianfrance’s careful hands, eventually arrive at a bleary poignancy.
I should probably disclose that, though it was a big thing for some kids in my high school back in the day, I have not read Lamb’s 900-page book. The novel, and Lamb’s other work, have had their legions of fans, but I wonder how many have stuck with their ardor for the 24 years it took for this adaptation to happen. It’s tough to say what the expectations for this series are, at least in terms of its status as the latest premier-class HBO adaptation of a popular novel.
I’m sure some are curious to see what Lamb’s work looks like on screen, but perhaps more will be intrigued by the presence of producer-star Mark Ruffalo—gone from bright Hulk green to a shaggy pallor to play twin brothers reeling in a spin cycle of tragedy. This project brings Ruffalo the closest he’s been, of late, to the granular, wistful realism of his breakout role in 2000’s You Can Count On Me, another weary but far more affecting sibling drama from Kenneth Lonergan. It’s nice seeing Ruffalo back in this small-town, regular-guy vein, and he tucks into his double task with respectable intensity.
But good lord, what that intensity is in service of. I Know This Much Is True throws stone after stone at Dominick and Thomas Birdsey, twins born in 1950 who find themselves at conflicted early-middle-age as the first Gulf War ramps into action in 1990. Thomas is schizophrenic and has been a constant concern and, yes, burden for his brother and their mother and step-father. But the pain is inflicted in both directions, a bitter fact seen in fuller and fuller portrait as the series drifts back and forth in time, from the boys’ childhood, to their adolescence (when they’re played by Philip Ettinger, drooping his mouth just right), to their mournful, sorry adulthood.
You want to know what happens to this family? Here’s a sampling (consider yourself spoiler warned, though the book has been out for a quarter-century): There’s the aforementioned schizophrenia, there’s cancer, there’s a massive heart attack, there’s a car accident, there’s a suicide, there are several rapes, a baby dies, a hand gets cut off, and someone tumbles off a roof. This all befalls the twins’ and their kin over the course of the show’s six hours. It’s a towering wall of hardship, the kind that, yes, I suppose gives a novel the kind of literary heft often gravitated toward by people looking for a Serious Book. (Think of the more recent doorstopper A Little Life—or, to be fair, the overly tragedy-laden young-adult book written by this critic.) But condensed to the shorter form of television, the Birdseys’ various ordeals look like a careless heap of misfortune; all that’s missing is a kitchen sink with a drinking problem.